July 6, 2024 • 37 mins
This podcast was brought to you by GE Silos. Visit https://www.gesilos.com.au/ today.
New farm office tech and cybersecurity with Carmen Quade
“I think the first thing to do is to get comfortable with being uncomfortable. When new things come in, we’re often bad at it.
“And as adults, you don't like that feeling of things being difficult or hard or harder than they were. And it's just acknowledging that initially things are going to be harder before they get easier and just persisting through that.”
In our third episode, we chat with AgriFocused’s Carmen, who shares the latest farm office technology to make your office time more efficient. Carmen also discusses some quick wins when it comes to software already available but not always used to its fullest. The farm business expert also shares some of her tips on how to protect yourself, your farm business and those you love from cybercrime.
About Carmen Quade
Carmen Quade runs AgriFocused, a training business specialising in farm business skills. She has worked as a university lecturer in accounting and agribusiness and enjoys working with people to improve their business skills. She also has extensive experience in local government, both in economic and community development as well as corporate governance. Together with her husband and other family members, she is a partner in a mixed farming business at Tallimba, in the Northern Riverina. She works her magic in the office, not the paddock. Carmen holds a Bachelor of Business (Agricultural Commerce), a Master of Professional Accounting and a Cert IV in Training Small Groups.
You can learn more about Carmen by visiting her website: https://agrifocused.com.au/ and following her on X @AgriFocused or Instagram @AgriFocused
You can find Carmen on:
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/carmen-quade-agrifocused-97412b198/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/agrifocused/
Helpful links:
Password Management Software
Software for ease of data entry for invoices
Software to make your own forms and related QR codes
https://www.google.com.au/forms/about/
Cyber Safety
https://www.ncsc.gov.uk/collection/top-tips-for-staying-secure-online
Information on improving your internet and mobile access
https://regionaltechhub.org.au/
Tips on managing emails
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
S1 (00:00):
BCG acknowledges the traditional custodians of country throughout Australia and
their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our
respects to their elders, past and present.
S2 (00:10):
This podcast was brought to you by GE silos.
S3 (00:14):
I think the first thing to do is get comfortable
with being uncomfortable, as they say. Like when things come
in and they're new, we're often bad at it. And
as adults, you don't like that feeling of things being
difficult or harder than they were, and it's just acknowledging
that initially things are going to be harder before they
get easier and just persisting through that. Hello and welcome
(00:36):
back to Shared Solutions by BCG. I'm Janine Batters and
in this episode we're going to be speaking with Agrifocused's .
S2 (00:42):
Carmen Quade who we have had on the podcast before.
And I'm really excited to have again, she's going to
be speaking with us about new technology in the farm
office and how we can use it to not only
make farm office work easier, but also how we can
use it to make better decisions. And so we can
be focusing more on what's important. So thanks so much, Carmen.
S3 (01:05):
Thanks, Janine. Good to see you.
S2 (01:06):
I'm so excited to have you back. And I should say,
if our listeners haven't heard our last podcast with Carmen,
I do recommend you go back and listen to that,
because she is just a wealth of knowledge. And it
was a really popular with our listeners . Carmen, And just
for our listeners that don't know you, can you give us
a little bit of a background on you?
S3 (01:24):
Agrifocused is my side business. My main business is actually our
farming business. So I farm in conjunction with my husband,
and my brother and sister in law are also in
our family partnership. So we're predominantly cropping and we're located
at Tallimba, which is the northern Riverina of New South Wales.
S2 (01:38):
And we've got a lot of qualifications, Carmen, you're very experienced.
Can you just quickly tell our listeners?
S3 (01:44):
So yeah, although they're dating me now, but I started
off with a Bachelor of Business in Agricultural commerce, and
then I've gone on to do a master's in accounting
and had a stint actually lecturing at CSU in agribusiness
and in accounting. And from that that led into my
Agrifocused business now, which is more about direct to the
farmer education rather than to, you know, graduate and undergraduate students.
S2 (02:10):
We're so lucky to have you here today, Carmen. So
can you tell us just for a start. So we're
going to focus on a few things today. We're going
to focus on some new technologies, some things that possibly
some people are doing, but other people aren't. And then
some things that we need to be doing now, definitely,
if we're not doing them. So could you just start
by giving us an overview of what are some of
(02:31):
the things that are on the horizon?
S3 (02:34):
Oh, it's getting really exciting. And I think the whole
focus of it is reducing that mundane day to day
repetitive tasks and automating all of those and more sort
of voice recognition, text recognition. So with our bookkeeping systems,
we see now, like if you're in Xero, someone can
send you an invoice in Xero and it directly loads
all the details into your accounting program. We're going to
(02:56):
see more cross program, so you can send an invoice
from MYOB straight into Xero. Or you can send them
Xero straight back into MYOB or everything like that. So
why would.
S2 (03:05):
You want to do that?
S3 (03:06):
So instead of actually going there and typing in six
bags of dog food, and how many thousand tons of
fertilizer and whatever else, it's all loaded in there for you.
Precoding all of that sort of stuff. It's all happening
in an automated fashion. So it's just about you having
those internal processes to say, yes, we've bought this stuff
and yes, we're ready to pay the bill and we'll
see more of that text and voice recognition stuff. So
(03:29):
basically being able to send a text to your accounting
program and it might say Bill Joe Bloggs for 50
acres or 100 acres worth of spreading at $22 an acre,
and it will do up the invoice and send it
to him. And that's all you have to do. So
that's not very far away in terms of text. It'll
be a little bit longer with voice recognition, but it
won't be far away at all. So it's the equivalent
(03:51):
of ringing your sidekick in the office, in the farm office,
from down the paddock and saying, oh, can you just
sort this out for me? And instead of it being
a person on the other end of the phone, it's AI,
or it's just a text message to an AI enabled
computer program that will eliminate a lot of that admin
for you.
S2 (04:09):
So are you saying, just to clarify, say I went
and ordered some chemical get the invoice. They're going to
send me an invoice from Xero, and I'm going to
be able to put it straight into MYOB , and
I'm not going to need to allocate that.
S3 (04:21):
That'll be where it'll go. You'll set up rules and
things in the first place to, you know, so that
identifies MAP as fertilizer and it identifies urea as fertilizer.
And then that'll be the way that it will go.
So there's certainly some things that are happening now that
people will be doing in terms of directly emailing invoices
into MYOB or Xero or Phoenix and this OCR. So
(04:42):
this optical character recognition is already reading some of those
details in now in most of the programs, it's really
quite capable of picking up the names of the businesses,
the due dates and the amount. There's some programs out there.
Dext is one of them that will read in every
line item of the bill if you want it to.
So those are sort of premium end products at the moment.
(05:05):
But like we know with all technology it starts at
that premium end and then it tends to work down
to the mainstream programs that are available at the average
per month or per annual cost of subscription. So that's
really not very far away at all.
S2 (05:20):
So is Dext a different software or is that a plugin?
S3 (05:24):
Yeah, it's like a plugin that works with Xero and
with MYOB, similar to Hubdoc. You send your invoice into that.
It does some of that early level processing and then
shoots it through into Xero. which is better? It's all
about subscription cost versus time saved. So for a business
that's processing 70 or 90 invoices a month, I think
(05:48):
something like Dext is just a really good option. For
a business that's only doing 10 to 15. It's a
waste of money, and you're better off spending that somewhere else,
perhaps within your farm office or your farm business, because
you're not getting the time savings that you need. So
it's all about, I think, balancing these things off like
any tech, like any tool and saying which one is
(06:10):
going to give me the best bang for my buck.
Eventually they're all going to become very much mainstream, and
we're all going to be getting that same sort of
functionality as those programs continue to develop. Yeah.
S2 (06:20):
So does that mean that I wouldn't have to do
any allocating?
S3 (06:23):
It'll happen. It will happen. Sign me up! And look,
even now there's you can set up rules in your
existing programs so that it always recognizes. And you've probably
got these in place already, but it always recognizes that
electricity bill is to be coded to electricity and your
rates are the same. It's only those really large ones
that tend to be problematic with the multi-product rural suppliers.
So that might be elders or Nutrien or AGnVET or
(06:45):
Delta or whoever you use where they've got potentially 16
different codes on one bill.
S2 (06:51):
They take the time, they're difficult.
S3 (06:53):
So there are some great things that people are doing
now that perhaps are going to become more mainstream in
the future. And there's a lot of people that outsource
their bookwork, but there's an increasing group of people that
are outsourcing it internationally. And I think that's really interesting.
So they've got a VA or a PA that's typically
based in the Philippines doing their farm admin for them
(07:16):
from a different country. So that's sort of a bit
mind blowing for some people. It wasn't all that long
ago where we were individually paying all our bills from
cheque from home and posting them off, and now potentially
the same businesses have got someone based in the Philippines
that they've never met who's doing a lot of that
data processing for them.
S2 (07:34):
Not paying bills, though, just processing it.
S3 (07:36):
Well, depending on the relationship that's got set up, commonly
it's processing. But again, you know, with time and with
secure relationships and more secure connections, some of the banks
are putting barriers in place about those people paying bills
for you. But you know, it will happen. It will
definitely happen because there's people at that corporate end doing it. Now,
as we talk about that drift of technology that eventually
(07:58):
then flows down to the smaller businesses as well.
S2 (08:01):
That's amazing that the trust involved there, I think. Yeah,
it would be great though, wouldn't it, to just go.
You do that.
S3 (08:08):
Yeah. Off you go. Can you do that. Yeah. And
again like the sort of relationship that you would have
with somebody back in the farm office, typically we ring
mum and we get mum to do it for us.
You ring your wife and you get her to do
it for you. So it's that sort of relationship that
you would text or you would have little some communication
channel or a jobs program, and you would just get
them to do those little jobs for you booking motels,
(08:28):
booking in car services, all of that sort of stuff.
S2 (08:32):
That's common.
S3 (08:33):
Yeah. And it will become, I think, more common in
the future. But obviously those people are available domestically based
as well. The difference, I guess, between the international and
domestic is generally the cost. Outsourcing is such a fantastic
way of freeing up time because not only are you
freeing up your own time, you potentially paying someone to
(08:55):
do it that's quicker at it than you are, so
you don't shear your own sheep, because why? You probably could if you
had to. But the reality is that you're going to
be slower at it and probably not do as good
a job. So you pay someone else to do that.
And it's the same when we outsource bookkeeping, we're just
outsourcing to someone that does it quicker than us and
better than us, which frees us up in two ways
(09:15):
the time saved and the fact that it's quicker for
them to do it and then, in the long run,
potentially cheaper for us as well.
S2 (09:21):
And that doesn't actually mean that you might spend less
time in the farm office, does it? And it might
just mean that you're spending more time on those, the
management side of it and looking at your figures and
thinking about, oh, I'm a bit overspending there. Or rather
than just doing the, the allocating.
S3 (09:38):
Oh yes, it's sure. So you move from this whole, oh,
if you think of a finance department in any larger business,
you've got financial admin or a finance officer that's sort
of at that lower end who does data processing, invoicing,
paying bills, payroll and that sort of thing. And then
you might have a management accountant who's actually looking at
which sectors of the business are making money and which
(10:01):
ones aren't, and what needs to be done there. And
then at the top, you've got a chief financial officer
who's dealing more with that strategy sort of piece, modeling
things out, looking at tax implications, looking at business structure,
looking at that sort of 10 to 20 year plan.
So what you find is that as you automate more
of this stuff that's at that finance officer level, it
(10:23):
frees you up to do that bigger picture stuff, the budgeting,
the planning, the scheduling, the comparing enterprises and all of
that sort of thing.
S2 (10:31):
I can't help but compare it to making a cake
for a birthday party. Carmen. Yeah, I find that if
I buy the cake , it ends up looking really nice
because I haven't wasted my energy on making the cake,
if I make the cake, I'm like, ah, can't be bothered.
And it's done. So it's the same as going. Rather
than investing all this energy into something that someone else
(10:51):
can do that doesn't have your brainpower i n the farm space,
we only have a limited amount of time, so making
smarter choices with your time so you can best spend
it where your business needs it.
S3 (11:02):
Yeah. And working to your strengths. I find, though, that
the people that tend to be most reluctant to outsource
stuff are the people that tend to be generally proficient
at a lot of things, and they're the ones that
find it the hardest. So they go, well, I can
cook my own cake. What's she talking about? And I
can do my own books. I can drive my own
tractor and do the services and do all of this.
(11:22):
Those are the people that tend to find it the
hardest to outsource because they're happy with the job they do.
They know how they want the job done. So if
that's you, just have a bit of a think about it.
It's not just about giving away things that you're not
good at. We've all got a limited amount of time.
Sometimes it's about handing over things that yes, you can do,
(11:42):
but in reality you can't do everything.
S2 (11:46):
Which is a great point. I think a lot of
those people that you're talking about become farmers. They they
know how to do a whole heap of stuff and
they know how to do it really well. So I
think that message about just because you can do it
and just because you can do it well, think about
where you are spending that time and where else would
be better to spend that time.
S3 (12:03):
Yeah, exactly. And what brings you the most joy? Does
that bring you joy? Perhaps not, even though you could
do a proficient job at it, but there might be
something else that is just more fulfilling for you. And,
you know, if that's the case, concentrate on that instead.
S2 (12:17):
I love that point. Yeah. What do you enjoy doing
on the farm? Because there's so much to do. We
often think about what we need to do rather than
what do you enjoy doing the most?
S3 (12:25):
Yeah, definitely. So there's other sort of really simple bits
of technology that are available now that we're perhaps not
using to their full potential, and one of those might
just be your printer. So if you've got a fairly
modern printer, it's generally got wireless capability. So you'd be
able to print from your phone. Yeah. If you set
that up, you'll be able to scan directly into a
(12:47):
cloud based document storage system, scan directly to an email,
scan directly into a folder where things stay permanently and
are never touched. So there's lots of capabilities there that people,
I think have got already that might not be exploring.
S2 (13:02):
We scan our farm documents from our phone straight to
MYOB , because then you can't lose a receipt, can you?
S3 (13:09):
Like those things are just great. And then on that
other end, that OCR stuff's coming in. It's reading some
of that information for you and eliminating that part of
the process as well. So it's really, really good. We've got,
you know, batch payments, rules, apps that link in with
lots of programs. And we're seeing a lot more of that,
aren't we? A few years ago it was like, if you're
with Microsoft, Microsoft was trying to take over the world.
(13:31):
Nothing else would work with it. Everything was fighting one another.
And you'd have these glitches between, say, Adobe and a
Microsoft program, and they really wouldn't want to talk to
one another. Whereas now it's all about this connectivity. So
we're getting all of this integration between apps, which is
making things so much easier. So we have one data
set that we're using, and we might have other bits
(13:52):
of software that extract information or allow us to put
in information or allow us to add on some extra
information in there. So can you give me.
S2 (13:59):
An example of that Carmen.
S3 (14:01):
AgWorld, which people quite often use for their cropping? And
we've got Mobble that links in with that. So it's
a livestock system. So they're linked so that you can
make some changes in one and they're reflected in another.
So we've got uh Figured which links in with Xero.
So Figured is a specific ag based software add on.
And there are a number of other cash flow budgeting
(14:22):
programs that are specifically built for agriculture that again link
with Xero and link with other programs as well. So what does Figured do?
So Figured does your management accounting basically came from the dairy industry.
So you know the dairy industry is so data intensive.
And they can work out how many cents of labor
you've got per kilo of milk solids. So but in
a more extensive or a mixed farming enterprise, you're looking
(14:44):
at potentially comparing relative profitability of different crops and different
crops in different years, and you're drilling down to then
allocating some of those overhead costs across a number of enterprises. Again,
more of that management, accounting and budgeting side of things,
rather than just the data entry and the data processing
of invoices and bills and payroll.
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S2 (15:42):
Okay, so I keep interrupting because you keep saying really
interesting things and I'm like, oh, what's that what you
said batching payments too.
S3 (15:49):
Yeah. So that's all of the accounting programs have got
this ability and it's great. So typically someone will get
a pile of bills. They'll go into the internet banking
and they'll pay them one by one, and then they'll
go into their bookkeeping program and they'll go to each line,
which is hopefully being automatically read in by their software,
and they'll go, okay, that matches up with this bill
(16:09):
that I've got here from Nutrien and that was fertilizer.
So I code that. So in batching we reverse it.
So what we do is enter all of the information
into our software program first. So it might be Phoenix
or MYOB or Xero. Any of them do it. We
enter all the information in first and we code it.
And then we go into the bookkeeping program and say,
I want to pay that bill. And the program generates
(16:31):
an ABA file, an Australian Banking Association file. You then
go into your internet banking and it will drop in
30 or 40 bills with the account numbers, the name
and the amount. And you will do one authorisation to
send all of those bills off all together. So what that
saves is that individual authorisation, the pay bill. And then
(16:53):
it sends you a text message. And then you can
type in the code. And then you want to put
the next one in. And you've got to make sure
that you've updated the account details and all of that
sort of thing. And then you make mistakes, and that's
what takes the time, I think we often don't recognize
as you just transpose two digits, and then you get
to the end of the month and you're trying to
reconcile everything and nothing matches up. So then you've got
to work out where there's an underpayment or an overpayment,
(17:14):
whether the payment was right or the data entry in our
accounting system, when we make mistakes doing batch payments, they're
really consistent. So the mistake is everywhere and the mistake
is exactly the same. And once we work out what
we've done wrong, we only fix it once rather than
going through and fixing it one in that bit, but
not in that. And then again, so things like that,
they're there now. They've been around for years. Um, but
(17:36):
there's still people that may not be using them or
may not be using them to their full capability.
S2 (17:40):
I think I inquired with our bank and they said
that we needed to have a special business profile, or
we had to pay an extra amount.
S3 (17:48):
You mentioned two really good points there, Janine. One was
that there are different internet banking profiles for lots of banks.
So lots of banks will have a generic basically domestic
consumer based internet banking profile. And they will also have
a higher level business banking internet tool. And some farmers
(18:09):
might be just using the domestic version, and the domestic
version will have limited security features. Limited features in terms
of authorizing payments potentially might be a little bit quicker
to use. But will have some limitations. So the the
more professional ones will have more security features like two
(18:30):
factor authentication. They might have some features that enable you
to have staff or outsourced help for some of these things.
So the staff might have authority to upload a payment
file to the bank, but they can't send off the money.
They can get that to a certain point. And then
one person, or perhaps in some corporate fields, they might
say we need two people to authorize a payment. So
(18:52):
they would have the ability for one person to authorize
the payment, and then two other signatories would come in
and authorize that. But they'll often have unlimited amounts of payments.
And that's a really important time saver for people. So
we've all had to pay those really big bills. You
might be limited with internet banking to 20 or $30,000
or $40,000. And you go there one day, $40,000, next day,
(19:15):
$40,000 next day, and then you're counting them up on
your fingers trying to work out whether that tractor is
paid for, with those higher level business banking type internet facilities,
it'll be just one payment.
S2 (19:25):
Do you recommend that?
S3 (19:27):
Definitely. It's a huge time saver and they are more secure.
So they do have a higher level. We've got two
factor authentication to get into them and then two factor
authentication to generate a payment that they yeah they're definitely
well worth exploring.
S2 (19:44):
Yeah. What else, Carmen, what other things are on the horizon?
S3 (19:47):
What else? Look, there's apps for everything. Anything you can imagine.
So if you've got a data collection or a data
recording problem, someone, somewhere has developed an app to solve it.
Like in anything in farming. There's great people out there
just making their own stuff in the shed. And that's
what I really like just to see happen. So I
did a workshop up north last week, and there's one
(20:08):
off the shelf free program called Jotform. And a lot
of people would be familiar with Google Forms, and we
can put some links to these in the show notes.
So one fellow was a contractor. He developed his own
job logging form for his staff. So if they went
out and did some harvesting, it allowed them to jot
down who the person was, who the farmer was, how
(20:28):
many hectares they'd put in, which paddocks they'd done, which
implements they'd used, their starting hours on the machine, finishing
hours on the machine, diesel litres, etc. so he'd personalize
that just to exactly the information that he needed. And
then he got real time access to that information as
soon as the job was done. And then another person
had done a similar sort of Google form to record
(20:49):
fuel usage across their farm and where they were using it,
and that was helping them with their fuel tax rebates. So, look,
there's apps for both of those sorts of things. But
they found a really entry level, low cost solution by
having one standalone form that they used. And a lot
of those have got QR codes that you can generate.
So if you've got perhaps staff that come in and out,
(21:12):
you can just give them the QR code to log in.
And I've got one on my website I've set up
as a visitor register. So QR code on the gate
or QR code on a piece of paper in the shed.
Can you just log into this and log yourself in
as a visitor so you know there's lots of potential
there to either explore what's out there and what's already
been made, or potentially just make your own little thing
(21:33):
in the office that'll do a good enough job for
what you're trying to achieve.
S2 (21:36):
You talked about some of the things that are on
the horizon. I'm pretty excited about some of those things.
What are some things that we can be doing right now?
Carmen in the farm office using new technology.
S3 (21:47):
Oh, look, I think the first thing to do is
get comfortable with being uncomfortable, as they say. Like when
things come in and they're new, we're often bad at it.
And as adults, you don't like that feeling of things
being difficult or harder than they were. And it's just
acknowledging that initially things are going to be harder before
they get easier, and just persisting through that.
S2 (22:08):
That's such a good point. I think because you're right,
it can be quite difficult. And you think, oh, this
is hard and I've made a mistake and I think
it's okay to to make the mistake too, isn't it?
And go, well, I made a mistake. I'm not perfect
at this yet, but I'll get better and asking for
help too.
S3 (22:23):
Oh, definitely. There's so much help out there. There's so
many things are easier than they were. Mistakes are so
easy to fix in anything tech wise. They basically have
dumbed things down quite a bit. Don't be afraid of
breaking stuff. There's nothing, nothing out there that can be broken.
The other thing that you need to do is sort
out your internet connectivity. That's what I've got that down
(22:44):
as number two, but it's probably the number one thing
that you have to do. It is well worth spending
the money on. So we recently had the On Farm
Connectivity program. Round one's finished. Hopefully round two will come
out soon. And there's some grants out there for people
to increase their on farm connectivity. But it's about researching
what you need. What's going to work best for you,
is about making sure that everything around the house and
(23:06):
sheds are good? Or is it about making sure that
you've got greater levels of connectivity in your tractor? Because
that's essentially where you're doing the majority of your office
work because you're on Autosteer. Each farm business is going
to be different in where their priorities are, in terms
of where they want to spend their dollars on internet connectivity.
Do you have any recommendations? There's a great website called
(23:26):
Better Internet for Regional and Rural Australia, and there's some
really good recommendations there about what might suit. We've certainly,
like a lot of people have moved on to Starlink
and really noticed the difference there. And we've beamed that
out to a little shed and to a my little office. And,
you know, there's some just great potential there that we
didn't have even 3 or 4 years ago. And again,
(23:48):
prices are getting cheaper even with the existing Skymuster satellites there.
Before that, you're getting more data. It's cheaper. Things are
just getting better all the time. So it's just about
staying up to date with what's available. The other thing
I think that you need to do, if you haven't
done it already, is sort out email addresses. So with
things like digital signing, it's really important for everybody to
(24:11):
have their own individual email address. Now, lots of people,
when internet first came in, it was Bigpond for all
of us. And you often have a joint email address
with your spouse. You can't get away with that anymore.
We've got to have all got to have individual email
addresses to make sure some of these things work, and
it's well worth having separate email addresses for the farm bills.
(24:32):
It makes it easier for someone to access that if
they need to. So if you're looking to outsource, you
can just say rightio. We'll redirect this particular mail inbox
to you. Or just to keep that. We get so
many emails just to sort of basically draft it and say,
all of these are bills that I need to check
them once a week or so, but these things that
(24:53):
are coming in are likely to be more important. And
I check those on a daily basis.
S2 (24:58):
So you're saying with the auto sign that say two
people in the business, you both need your own email
address to do the auto sign?
S3 (25:07):
Yes.
S2 (25:08):
And you're also saying that you need two email addresses
each for the farm or just personally.
S3 (25:16):
Look, I think it's going to vary person to person
and business to business. I think you need one junk one,
and that's often just a matter of just retiring your
old Hotmail or your an old Gmail address or something
like that. So basically, any time you sign up for
a $25 discount or free shipping on something, you can
just use that email address and then not get bombarded
with the spam mail. That's a really good idea to
(25:38):
start with separating business and personal. So you might have
multiple inboxes and people think, oh, that's so hard to handle.
That's just too much logging in and logging out. It's not.
You can use Gmail or Outlook to actually set them up.
So you just go into outlook and you've got your
3 or 4 different email addresses there. One of them
(25:59):
you might be checking once a month because it's mainly spam.
One of them you might be checking once a day
because it's mainly important correspondence. Another one you might be
checking just 2 or 3 times a month because it's
mainly farm bills. And again, it's just about being able
to then maintain privacy. If in the future you decide
to outsource some of this. So if you've got one
(26:21):
email address, which is everything, it's really hard then to
give someone the autonomy to say, as each email comes through,
process that in the way that I want it processed.
So you're not there forwarding things all the time.
S2 (26:34):
Otherwise you're really not saving any time, are you? No, you're.
S3 (26:36):
Not, you're not. You might as well be doing it yourself.
And I think that's the point that people come to.
If I've got to forward that email address to them
and then I've got to approve that payment, I may
as well have done the whole thing myself. So it's
about just setting things up so they're easy for other
people as well. Think about that in terms of business
continuity as well. So a lot of us are running
businesses that might be quite large in terms of turnover,
(26:58):
but small in terms of admin capacity, and we don't
have replication in our farm offices. So if we're taken
out or another family member is taken out, that might
mean system shut down. So think about if we quarantine
all of our business email to one email address, we
can quickly redirect something, ring our accountant, engage a bookkeeper
(27:19):
and say look for the next six weeks. Can you
just take over this part of the role and make
sure all my staff get paid and my bills get paid?
It's harder to do that if we've got every single
thing about sport and school and footy and the grain
marketing and the bills and the newsletters and mates emailing
us if that's all in the same inbox, it becomes
(27:41):
a much harder job.
S2 (27:42):
That makes sense. What else, Carmen, can we be doing right now?
S3 (27:46):
Well, the other thing is online safety. And I think
when I've said some of these things, there've been people listening, going, oh,
that sounds frightening. What if I get hacked? You know,
it's all too hard. Your money's all on the cloud anyway.
So realistically, if you're concerned about putting a document in
a Google Drive or a Dropbox, just get over it
because all your money is on the cloud. Just get.
S2 (28:07):
Over it.
S3 (28:07):
It's not in a bank anywhere. No one's guarding it.
There's no one standing outside with a, you You know,
rifle or something. It's all on the cloud. So what
can you do on your end to increase your internet safety?
Multifactor ID on anything where you can switch it on
is so important. So that's when they shoot you a
little text message, and you've got to write that code
(28:28):
back into the program. It's annoying.
S2 (28:31):
My phone auto fills it. Yeah.
S3 (28:33):
It doesn't work so well on the laptop or on
the computer, but I love it when it auto fills.
What I didn't love was a few years back when
we didn't have a booster on the phone, and I'd
have to run outside and climb up to the top
of the cubby house, and then I'd hold my hand
up to get the text message. And then it was
like a race against time to get back into the
office again to type the code in. So look, if
(28:53):
that's still you, just spend the money, upgrade your mobile coverage.
If that's the thing that's stopping you turning on multifactor ID,
or you don't have your Wi-Fi set up properly, make
sure you spend the money to do that.
S2 (29:06):
That's a good point. Time saver not getting into the
cubby house.
S3 (29:08):
Yeah yeah yeah yeah, definitely. So the installing software updates
is really important as well. So when your phone says
it needs to do an update, when your laptop or
your computer says it needs to do an update, click
to do the update. Because what they're not telling you
is that they've found the hackers have found a way
to get in, and they've got a patch that will
protect you. So make sure you keep those up to date. So, Janine,
(29:31):
tell me, are your passwords, your dog's name and a
combination of someone's date of birth?
S2 (29:37):
They're not, I've recently done, a bit of a cyber security
kind of thing. And that's why I've done all the
password authentication - well when all the hacking happened, you know, Medibank.
Yes. And yeah. So I don't anymore. But I can
imagine that a lot of people would probably because there's
so many to remember, there are.
S3 (29:54):
So many to remember. And what we try and do
is by just changing a digit on the end or
just putting capitals on that one, you know, if we
have 5 or 6 goes at it, it will eventually
crack it. And you feel like a bit of a
hacker just by getting in yourself. The reality is that
if we're duplicating passwords, what happens is someone in the
tree gets hacked first and they're generally low stakes. So
(30:17):
it might be just your local shoe shop is set
up online purchasing, and they want you to get an account.
And you sign up for that because you get $10
off or something. They get hacked. And because you've used
your dog's name and your date of birth. They go, ooh,
what's the chance that Janine has also used this password
and this email address for something more important, and they
will eventually get in that way. So duplication is a
(30:38):
really bad idea. We need to use secure and complex passwords.
It's really hard to do that unless you're using a
password keeper program. So there's some great ones out. Yeah
they're amazing. So like 16 digit really complex passwords with
all of the things. And the beauty of it is
when we use that, they're not saying you've used this
(30:58):
password before. They're not saying we need a digit, we
We need a character. You haven't used a capital. The
passwords go through straight away all the time. And again,
a lot of those have got the capability to pre-fill them.
So those password vault programs, KeyPass, keychain, dashlane's one of the
ones I use, there's 4 or 5 of them out there.
That is all they do. You want a program that's standalone.
(31:21):
So yes, Apple have got some capabilities to store passwords.
Google have. But if they go down, the whole ship
goes down. So what you want to do is just
make sure it's a standalone password keeping and password generating
program and be prepared to pay money for it, because
if you're not paying money for it, how are they
getting the money? They need to keep your information safe?
(31:41):
So definitely explore that. They are one of those things
that does make life easier and makes you more secure.
S2 (31:50):
So, Carmen, security, what else can we be doing to
protect ourselves?
S3 (31:54):
Look, I think that in our family, businesses that tend
to be most vulnerable are the older generation and the
youngest generation. So for the older ones, it's about really
keeping in contact. So having those phone calls, just making
sure that if they're worried about a text message that's
come through about a toll, that they don't click on it,
(32:15):
that they give you a call, that you show them
how to block things, that you delete what needs to
be deleted, that they're just really cyber aware, and also
that they're not lonely because one of these things, and
it's not necessarily a farm business thing, it's about the
online romance, friendship, investment, sort of scams. The people that
tend to be the most vulnerable are those that are
(32:35):
the most lonely. So keeping in contact and being a
good family member to our oldies is just important for
so many reasons. But that's one of them. That's such
a good point.
S2 (32:47):
I think there was an article The Barefoot wrote about
that too, and about maybe just go over to your
neighbor and have a cup of coffee.
S3 (32:53):
Yeah, yeah. And if that stops them wanting to meet
up with Sam from Nigeria, that's a great thing because
they know that they've got someone to have a cup
of tea too that's prepared to listen to their problems. Look,
younger generations, it's more about that sort of sextortion type
sharing nudes piece. And again, it's about education again. It's
about conversations again. It's about making people feel happy in themselves,
(33:16):
secure and all of those things so that not, you know,
if something feels a little bit off, they've got the
confidence to just say, no, hold on, wait. That doesn't
feel quite right. So most definitely have those conversations with
your family members.
S2 (33:33):
Is there anything else that you would recommend our listeners
do right now if they're not already doing, whether it's
technology or cyber? Any other advice?
S3 (33:43):
I think it's being open minded and excited about the future.
It's easy to just slip into that zone of thinking, oh,
it's all too hard and everything's changing too quickly. All
of us can fall into that trap, but it's about
just taking on the changes one by one, working out
what needs to be done, and being prepared to make
that investment in learning something for the pay off later on.
(34:06):
We don't learn anything without deliberately making those choices to
learn it. So just step up to the plate and
take it on because you might surprise yourself. It might
be something that you really get into when you're really
good at it.
S2 (34:18):
That is such excellent advice, Carmen. Talking about keeping an
open mind with these new technologies I'm just thinking about
for people that are perhaps doing succession or someone starting
to take the books on from another person in the business,
would you have any advice on how to get that
transition to to go smoothly?
S3 (34:39):
Oh look, the technology transition and the intergenerational issues is
often clashes there. You know, there's often a person within
the business and they're probably the person listening to this
podcast that just wants to move things along really quickly.
So to all the tech people out there that are
keen to make the changes, there's just a few things
to be aware of. One is that if you are
(35:00):
trying to implement change, just make sure that it's got
a fair chance of success. So if you're trying to
get semi-literate truck driver to suddenly be using six different
apps for six different things, it's probably not going to work.
And you've got to look at implementing perhaps some easier
ways to make that work, which might be just screenshots
or still handing in a paper form, even though everybody
(35:21):
else is doing things the digital way. That's perfectly okay
if you're taking something on and you are making some changes,
the person that's taking it on, you've got to trust
them that they're doing the right thing. I think that
becomes a communication thing as well. So if you've got
an older generation saying, oh, look, before we used to
pay every bill, this person used to look over it.
(35:42):
And then I used to ring this and I'd send
a cheque off because that was the safe way of
doing it. Look, things have changed. And it's about really
communicating that we still are doing fundamentally the same thing.
We still have all of the checks and balances in place.
They just don't necessarily look the same as they used to.
But the fundamental things of what we've got going on,
(36:03):
people are getting paid. We're doing it in a secure
fashion we know we're up to financially. All of that
still happening.
S2 (36:09):
That's such a good point. Thank you. Carmen, was there
anything else that you would like our listeners to know?
S3 (36:15):
All just to get out there and explore something, just
to talk to their friends about it and ask them
what they're doing that 's different. It's great. Amongst any community.
We've got some great early adopters out there that are
looking at new things, and between the early adopters, some
of them have caught on to something else before someone
else has done so. My big thing is that if
you've got a problem, someone else has already worked out
(36:36):
the answer to it. It's just about finding what the
answer is.
S2 (36:39):
That's such a good outlook, Carmen. So I do have
one more question. What is the best advice that you've
been given, whether it's on the farm or in life?
S3 (36:48):
Oh, look, I think the big thing is that nothing
lasts forever, you know, and it's just whatever season you're
going through in your life, whatever seasonal conditions you're going
through on farm, whatever it is, it never, ever lasts forever.
So it's just very much about being in the moment
and working out what needs to be done now and
concentrating on that, because before you know it, something else
(37:10):
becomes the highest priority.
S1 (37:14):
BCG drives the prosperity of Australian farmers, communities and landscapes
through applied research, innovation and events. To find out more
about what we're up to, our team and events near you,
visit bcg.org.au
BCG acknowledges the traditional custodians of country throughout Australia and
their connections to land, sea and community. We pay our
respects to their elders, past and present.
S2 (00:10):
This podcast was brought to you by GE silos.
S3 (00:14):
I think the first thing to do is get comfortable
with being uncomfortable, as they say. Like when things come
in and they're new, we're often bad at it. And
as adults, you don't like that feeling of things being
difficult or harder than they were, and it's just acknowledging
that initially things are going to be harder before they
get easier and just persisting through that. Hello and welcome
(00:36):
back to Shared Solutions by BCG. I'm Janine Batters and
in this episode we're going to be speaking with Agrifocused's .
S2 (00:42):
Carmen Quade who we have had on the podcast before.
And I'm really excited to have again, she's going to
be speaking with us about new technology in the farm
office and how we can use it to not only
make farm office work easier, but also how we can
use it to make better decisions. And so we can
be focusing more on what's important. So thanks so much, Carmen.
S3 (01:05):
Thanks, Janine. Good to see you.
S2 (01:06):
I'm so excited to have you back. And I should say,
if our listeners haven't heard our last podcast with Carmen,
I do recommend you go back and listen to that,
because she is just a wealth of knowledge. And it
was a really popular with our listeners . Carmen, And just
for our listeners that don't know you, can you give us
a little bit of a background on you?
S3 (01:24):
Agrifocused is my side business. My main business is actually our
farming business. So I farm in conjunction with my husband,
and my brother and sister in law are also in
our family partnership. So we're predominantly cropping and we're located
at Tallimba, which is the northern Riverina of New South Wales.
S2 (01:38):
And we've got a lot of qualifications, Carmen, you're very experienced.
Can you just quickly tell our listeners?
S3 (01:44):
So yeah, although they're dating me now, but I started
off with a Bachelor of Business in Agricultural commerce, and
then I've gone on to do a master's in accounting
and had a stint actually lecturing at CSU in agribusiness
and in accounting. And from that that led into my
Agrifocused business now, which is more about direct to the
farmer education rather than to, you know, graduate and undergraduate students.
S2 (02:10):
We're so lucky to have you here today, Carmen. So
can you tell us just for a start. So we're
going to focus on a few things today. We're going
to focus on some new technologies, some things that possibly
some people are doing, but other people aren't. And then
some things that we need to be doing now, definitely,
if we're not doing them. So could you just start
by giving us an overview of what are some of
(02:31):
the things that are on the horizon?
S3 (02:34):
Oh, it's getting really exciting. And I think the whole
focus of it is reducing that mundane day to day
repetitive tasks and automating all of those and more sort
of voice recognition, text recognition. So with our bookkeeping systems,
we see now, like if you're in Xero, someone can
send you an invoice in Xero and it directly loads
all the details into your accounting program. We're going to
(02:56):
see more cross program, so you can send an invoice
from MYOB straight into Xero. Or you can send them
Xero straight back into MYOB or everything like that. So
why would.
S2 (03:05):
You want to do that?
S3 (03:06):
So instead of actually going there and typing in six
bags of dog food, and how many thousand tons of
fertilizer and whatever else, it's all loaded in there for you.
Precoding all of that sort of stuff. It's all happening
in an automated fashion. So it's just about you having
those internal processes to say, yes, we've bought this stuff
and yes, we're ready to pay the bill and we'll
see more of that text and voice recognition stuff. So
(03:29):
basically being able to send a text to your accounting
program and it might say Bill Joe Bloggs for 50
acres or 100 acres worth of spreading at $22 an acre,
and it will do up the invoice and send it
to him. And that's all you have to do. So
that's not very far away in terms of text. It'll
be a little bit longer with voice recognition, but it
won't be far away at all. So it's the equivalent
(03:51):
of ringing your sidekick in the office, in the farm office,
from down the paddock and saying, oh, can you just
sort this out for me? And instead of it being
a person on the other end of the phone, it's AI,
or it's just a text message to an AI enabled
computer program that will eliminate a lot of that admin
for you.
S2 (04:09):
So are you saying, just to clarify, say I went
and ordered some chemical get the invoice. They're going to
send me an invoice from Xero, and I'm going to
be able to put it straight into MYOB , and
I'm not going to need to allocate that.
S3 (04:21):
That'll be where it'll go. You'll set up rules and
things in the first place to, you know, so that
identifies MAP as fertilizer and it identifies urea as fertilizer.
And then that'll be the way that it will go.
So there's certainly some things that are happening now that
people will be doing in terms of directly emailing invoices
into MYOB or Xero or Phoenix and this OCR. So
(04:42):
this optical character recognition is already reading some of those
details in now in most of the programs, it's really
quite capable of picking up the names of the businesses,
the due dates and the amount. There's some programs out there.
Dext is one of them that will read in every
line item of the bill if you want it to.
So those are sort of premium end products at the moment.
(05:05):
But like we know with all technology it starts at
that premium end and then it tends to work down
to the mainstream programs that are available at the average
per month or per annual cost of subscription. So that's
really not very far away at all.
S2 (05:20):
So is Dext a different software or is that a plugin?
S3 (05:24):
Yeah, it's like a plugin that works with Xero and
with MYOB, similar to Hubdoc. You send your invoice into that.
It does some of that early level processing and then
shoots it through into Xero. which is better? It's all
about subscription cost versus time saved. So for a business
that's processing 70 or 90 invoices a month, I think
(05:48):
something like Dext is just a really good option. For
a business that's only doing 10 to 15. It's a
waste of money, and you're better off spending that somewhere else,
perhaps within your farm office or your farm business, because
you're not getting the time savings that you need. So
it's all about, I think, balancing these things off like
any tech, like any tool and saying which one is
(06:10):
going to give me the best bang for my buck.
Eventually they're all going to become very much mainstream, and
we're all going to be getting that same sort of
functionality as those programs continue to develop. Yeah.
S2 (06:20):
So does that mean that I wouldn't have to do
any allocating?
S3 (06:23):
It'll happen. It will happen. Sign me up! And look,
even now there's you can set up rules in your
existing programs so that it always recognizes. And you've probably
got these in place already, but it always recognizes that
electricity bill is to be coded to electricity and your
rates are the same. It's only those really large ones
that tend to be problematic with the multi-product rural suppliers.
So that might be elders or Nutrien or AGnVET or
(06:45):
Delta or whoever you use where they've got potentially 16
different codes on one bill.
S2 (06:51):
They take the time, they're difficult.
S3 (06:53):
So there are some great things that people are doing
now that perhaps are going to become more mainstream in
the future. And there's a lot of people that outsource
their bookwork, but there's an increasing group of people that
are outsourcing it internationally. And I think that's really interesting.
So they've got a VA or a PA that's typically
based in the Philippines doing their farm admin for them
(07:16):
from a different country. So that's sort of a bit
mind blowing for some people. It wasn't all that long
ago where we were individually paying all our bills from
cheque from home and posting them off, and now potentially
the same businesses have got someone based in the Philippines
that they've never met who's doing a lot of that
data processing for them.
S2 (07:34):
Not paying bills, though, just processing it.
S3 (07:36):
Well, depending on the relationship that's got set up, commonly
it's processing. But again, you know, with time and with
secure relationships and more secure connections, some of the banks
are putting barriers in place about those people paying bills
for you. But you know, it will happen. It will
definitely happen because there's people at that corporate end doing it. Now,
as we talk about that drift of technology that eventually
(07:58):
then flows down to the smaller businesses as well.
S2 (08:01):
That's amazing that the trust involved there, I think. Yeah,
it would be great though, wouldn't it, to just go.
You do that.
S3 (08:08):
Yeah. Off you go. Can you do that. Yeah. And
again like the sort of relationship that you would have
with somebody back in the farm office, typically we ring
mum and we get mum to do it for us.
You ring your wife and you get her to do
it for you. So it's that sort of relationship that
you would text or you would have little some communication
channel or a jobs program, and you would just get
them to do those little jobs for you booking motels,
(08:28):
booking in car services, all of that sort of stuff.
S2 (08:32):
That's common.
S3 (08:33):
Yeah. And it will become, I think, more common in
the future. But obviously those people are available domestically based
as well. The difference, I guess, between the international and
domestic is generally the cost. Outsourcing is such a fantastic
way of freeing up time because not only are you
freeing up your own time, you potentially paying someone to
(08:55):
do it that's quicker at it than you are, so
you don't shear your own sheep, because why? You probably could if you
had to. But the reality is that you're going to
be slower at it and probably not do as good
a job. So you pay someone else to do that.
And it's the same when we outsource bookkeeping, we're just
outsourcing to someone that does it quicker than us and
better than us, which frees us up in two ways
(09:15):
the time saved and the fact that it's quicker for
them to do it and then, in the long run,
potentially cheaper for us as well.
S2 (09:21):
And that doesn't actually mean that you might spend less
time in the farm office, does it? And it might
just mean that you're spending more time on those, the
management side of it and looking at your figures and
thinking about, oh, I'm a bit overspending there. Or rather
than just doing the, the allocating.
S3 (09:38):
Oh yes, it's sure. So you move from this whole, oh,
if you think of a finance department in any larger business,
you've got financial admin or a finance officer that's sort
of at that lower end who does data processing, invoicing,
paying bills, payroll and that sort of thing. And then
you might have a management accountant who's actually looking at
which sectors of the business are making money and which
(10:01):
ones aren't, and what needs to be done there. And
then at the top, you've got a chief financial officer
who's dealing more with that strategy sort of piece, modeling
things out, looking at tax implications, looking at business structure,
looking at that sort of 10 to 20 year plan.
So what you find is that as you automate more
of this stuff that's at that finance officer level, it
(10:23):
frees you up to do that bigger picture stuff, the budgeting,
the planning, the scheduling, the comparing enterprises and all of
that sort of thing.
S2 (10:31):
I can't help but compare it to making a cake
for a birthday party. Carmen. Yeah, I find that if
I buy the cake , it ends up looking really nice
because I haven't wasted my energy on making the cake,
if I make the cake, I'm like, ah, can't be bothered.
And it's done. So it's the same as going. Rather
than investing all this energy into something that someone else
(10:51):
can do that doesn't have your brainpower i n the farm space,
we only have a limited amount of time, so making
smarter choices with your time so you can best spend
it where your business needs it.
S3 (11:02):
Yeah. And working to your strengths. I find, though, that
the people that tend to be most reluctant to outsource
stuff are the people that tend to be generally proficient
at a lot of things, and they're the ones that
find it the hardest. So they go, well, I can
cook my own cake. What's she talking about? And I
can do my own books. I can drive my own
tractor and do the services and do all of this.
(11:22):
Those are the people that tend to find it the
hardest to outsource because they're happy with the job they do.
They know how they want the job done. So if
that's you, just have a bit of a think about it.
It's not just about giving away things that you're not
good at. We've all got a limited amount of time.
Sometimes it's about handing over things that yes, you can do,
(11:42):
but in reality you can't do everything.
S2 (11:46):
Which is a great point. I think a lot of
those people that you're talking about become farmers. They they
know how to do a whole heap of stuff and
they know how to do it really well. So I
think that message about just because you can do it
and just because you can do it well, think about
where you are spending that time and where else would
be better to spend that time.
S3 (12:03):
Yeah, exactly. And what brings you the most joy? Does
that bring you joy? Perhaps not, even though you could
do a proficient job at it, but there might be
something else that is just more fulfilling for you. And,
you know, if that's the case, concentrate on that instead.
S2 (12:17):
I love that point. Yeah. What do you enjoy doing
on the farm? Because there's so much to do. We
often think about what we need to do rather than
what do you enjoy doing the most?
S3 (12:25):
Yeah, definitely. So there's other sort of really simple bits
of technology that are available now that we're perhaps not
using to their full potential, and one of those might
just be your printer. So if you've got a fairly
modern printer, it's generally got wireless capability. So you'd be
able to print from your phone. Yeah. If you set
that up, you'll be able to scan directly into a
(12:47):
cloud based document storage system, scan directly to an email,
scan directly into a folder where things stay permanently and
are never touched. So there's lots of capabilities there that people,
I think have got already that might not be exploring.
S2 (13:02):
We scan our farm documents from our phone straight to
MYOB , because then you can't lose a receipt, can you?
S3 (13:09):
Like those things are just great. And then on that
other end, that OCR stuff's coming in. It's reading some
of that information for you and eliminating that part of
the process as well. So it's really, really good. We've got,
you know, batch payments, rules, apps that link in with
lots of programs. And we're seeing a lot more of that,
aren't we? A few years ago it was like, if you're
with Microsoft, Microsoft was trying to take over the world.
(13:31):
Nothing else would work with it. Everything was fighting one another.
And you'd have these glitches between, say, Adobe and a
Microsoft program, and they really wouldn't want to talk to
one another. Whereas now it's all about this connectivity. So
we're getting all of this integration between apps, which is
making things so much easier. So we have one data
set that we're using, and we might have other bits
(13:52):
of software that extract information or allow us to put
in information or allow us to add on some extra
information in there. So can you give me.
S2 (13:59):
An example of that Carmen.
S3 (14:01):
AgWorld, which people quite often use for their cropping? And
we've got Mobble that links in with that. So it's
a livestock system. So they're linked so that you can
make some changes in one and they're reflected in another.
So we've got uh Figured which links in with Xero.
So Figured is a specific ag based software add on.
And there are a number of other cash flow budgeting
(14:22):
programs that are specifically built for agriculture that again link
with Xero and link with other programs as well. So what does Figured do?
So Figured does your management accounting basically came from the dairy industry.
So you know the dairy industry is so data intensive.
And they can work out how many cents of labor
you've got per kilo of milk solids. So but in
a more extensive or a mixed farming enterprise, you're looking
(14:44):
at potentially comparing relative profitability of different crops and different
crops in different years, and you're drilling down to then
allocating some of those overhead costs across a number of enterprises. Again,
more of that management, accounting and budgeting side of things,
rather than just the data entry and the data processing
of invoices and bills and payroll.
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S2 (15:42):
Okay, so I keep interrupting because you keep saying really
interesting things and I'm like, oh, what's that what you
said batching payments too.
S3 (15:49):
Yeah. So that's all of the accounting programs have got
this ability and it's great. So typically someone will get
a pile of bills. They'll go into the internet banking
and they'll pay them one by one, and then they'll
go into their bookkeeping program and they'll go to each line,
which is hopefully being automatically read in by their software,
and they'll go, okay, that matches up with this bill
(16:09):
that I've got here from Nutrien and that was fertilizer.
So I code that. So in batching we reverse it.
So what we do is enter all of the information
into our software program first. So it might be Phoenix
or MYOB or Xero. Any of them do it. We
enter all the information in first and we code it.
And then we go into the bookkeeping program and say,
I want to pay that bill. And the program generates
(16:31):
an ABA file, an Australian Banking Association file. You then
go into your internet banking and it will drop in
30 or 40 bills with the account numbers, the name
and the amount. And you will do one authorisation to
send all of those bills off all together. So what that
saves is that individual authorisation, the pay bill. And then
(16:53):
it sends you a text message. And then you can
type in the code. And then you want to put
the next one in. And you've got to make sure
that you've updated the account details and all of that
sort of thing. And then you make mistakes, and that's
what takes the time, I think we often don't recognize
as you just transpose two digits, and then you get
to the end of the month and you're trying to
reconcile everything and nothing matches up. So then you've got
to work out where there's an underpayment or an overpayment,
(17:14):
whether the payment was right or the data entry in our
accounting system, when we make mistakes doing batch payments, they're
really consistent. So the mistake is everywhere and the mistake
is exactly the same. And once we work out what
we've done wrong, we only fix it once rather than
going through and fixing it one in that bit, but
not in that. And then again, so things like that,
they're there now. They've been around for years. Um, but
(17:36):
there's still people that may not be using them or
may not be using them to their full capability.
S2 (17:40):
I think I inquired with our bank and they said
that we needed to have a special business profile, or
we had to pay an extra amount.
S3 (17:48):
You mentioned two really good points there, Janine. One was
that there are different internet banking profiles for lots of banks.
So lots of banks will have a generic basically domestic
consumer based internet banking profile. And they will also have
a higher level business banking internet tool. And some farmers
(18:09):
might be just using the domestic version, and the domestic
version will have limited security features. Limited features in terms
of authorizing payments potentially might be a little bit quicker
to use. But will have some limitations. So the the
more professional ones will have more security features like two
(18:30):
factor authentication. They might have some features that enable you
to have staff or outsourced help for some of these things.
So the staff might have authority to upload a payment
file to the bank, but they can't send off the money.
They can get that to a certain point. And then
one person, or perhaps in some corporate fields, they might
say we need two people to authorize a payment. So
(18:52):
they would have the ability for one person to authorize
the payment, and then two other signatories would come in
and authorize that. But they'll often have unlimited amounts of payments.
And that's a really important time saver for people. So
we've all had to pay those really big bills. You
might be limited with internet banking to 20 or $30,000
or $40,000. And you go there one day, $40,000, next day,
(19:15):
$40,000 next day, and then you're counting them up on
your fingers trying to work out whether that tractor is
paid for, with those higher level business banking type internet facilities,
it'll be just one payment.
S2 (19:25):
Do you recommend that?
S3 (19:27):
Definitely. It's a huge time saver and they are more secure.
So they do have a higher level. We've got two
factor authentication to get into them and then two factor
authentication to generate a payment that they yeah they're definitely
well worth exploring.
S2 (19:44):
Yeah. What else, Carmen, what other things are on the horizon?
S3 (19:47):
What else? Look, there's apps for everything. Anything you can imagine.
So if you've got a data collection or a data
recording problem, someone, somewhere has developed an app to solve it.
Like in anything in farming. There's great people out there
just making their own stuff in the shed. And that's
what I really like just to see happen. So I
did a workshop up north last week, and there's one
(20:08):
off the shelf free program called Jotform. And a lot
of people would be familiar with Google Forms, and we
can put some links to these in the show notes.
So one fellow was a contractor. He developed his own
job logging form for his staff. So if they went
out and did some harvesting, it allowed them to jot
down who the person was, who the farmer was, how
(20:28):
many hectares they'd put in, which paddocks they'd done, which
implements they'd used, their starting hours on the machine, finishing
hours on the machine, diesel litres, etc. so he'd personalize
that just to exactly the information that he needed. And
then he got real time access to that information as
soon as the job was done. And then another person
had done a similar sort of Google form to record
(20:49):
fuel usage across their farm and where they were using it,
and that was helping them with their fuel tax rebates. So, look,
there's apps for both of those sorts of things. But
they found a really entry level, low cost solution by
having one standalone form that they used. And a lot
of those have got QR codes that you can generate.
So if you've got perhaps staff that come in and out,
(21:12):
you can just give them the QR code to log in.
And I've got one on my website I've set up
as a visitor register. So QR code on the gate
or QR code on a piece of paper in the shed.
Can you just log into this and log yourself in
as a visitor so you know there's lots of potential
there to either explore what's out there and what's already
been made, or potentially just make your own little thing
(21:33):
in the office that'll do a good enough job for
what you're trying to achieve.
S2 (21:36):
You talked about some of the things that are on
the horizon. I'm pretty excited about some of those things.
What are some things that we can be doing right now?
Carmen in the farm office using new technology.
S3 (21:47):
Oh, look, I think the first thing to do is
get comfortable with being uncomfortable, as they say. Like when
things come in and they're new, we're often bad at it.
And as adults, you don't like that feeling of things
being difficult or harder than they were. And it's just
acknowledging that initially things are going to be harder before
they get easier, and just persisting through that.
S2 (22:08):
That's such a good point. I think because you're right,
it can be quite difficult. And you think, oh, this
is hard and I've made a mistake and I think
it's okay to to make the mistake too, isn't it?
And go, well, I made a mistake. I'm not perfect
at this yet, but I'll get better and asking for
help too.
S3 (22:23):
Oh, definitely. There's so much help out there. There's so
many things are easier than they were. Mistakes are so
easy to fix in anything tech wise. They basically have
dumbed things down quite a bit. Don't be afraid of
breaking stuff. There's nothing, nothing out there that can be broken.
The other thing that you need to do is sort
out your internet connectivity. That's what I've got that down
(22:44):
as number two, but it's probably the number one thing
that you have to do. It is well worth spending
the money on. So we recently had the On Farm
Connectivity program. Round one's finished. Hopefully round two will come
out soon. And there's some grants out there for people
to increase their on farm connectivity. But it's about researching
what you need. What's going to work best for you,
is about making sure that everything around the house and
(23:06):
sheds are good? Or is it about making sure that
you've got greater levels of connectivity in your tractor? Because
that's essentially where you're doing the majority of your office
work because you're on Autosteer. Each farm business is going
to be different in where their priorities are, in terms
of where they want to spend their dollars on internet connectivity.
Do you have any recommendations? There's a great website called
(23:26):
Better Internet for Regional and Rural Australia, and there's some
really good recommendations there about what might suit. We've certainly,
like a lot of people have moved on to Starlink
and really noticed the difference there. And we've beamed that
out to a little shed and to a my little office. And,
you know, there's some just great potential there that we
didn't have even 3 or 4 years ago. And again,
(23:48):
prices are getting cheaper even with the existing Skymuster satellites there.
Before that, you're getting more data. It's cheaper. Things are
just getting better all the time. So it's just about
staying up to date with what's available. The other thing
I think that you need to do, if you haven't
done it already, is sort out email addresses. So with
things like digital signing, it's really important for everybody to
(24:11):
have their own individual email address. Now, lots of people,
when internet first came in, it was Bigpond for all
of us. And you often have a joint email address
with your spouse. You can't get away with that anymore.
We've got to have all got to have individual email
addresses to make sure some of these things work, and
it's well worth having separate email addresses for the farm bills.
(24:32):
It makes it easier for someone to access that if
they need to. So if you're looking to outsource, you
can just say rightio. We'll redirect this particular mail inbox
to you. Or just to keep that. We get so
many emails just to sort of basically draft it and say,
all of these are bills that I need to check
them once a week or so, but these things that
(24:53):
are coming in are likely to be more important. And
I check those on a daily basis.
S2 (24:58):
So you're saying with the auto sign that say two
people in the business, you both need your own email
address to do the auto sign?
S3 (25:07):
Yes.
S2 (25:08):
And you're also saying that you need two email addresses
each for the farm or just personally.
S3 (25:16):
Look, I think it's going to vary person to person
and business to business. I think you need one junk one,
and that's often just a matter of just retiring your
old Hotmail or your an old Gmail address or something
like that. So basically, any time you sign up for
a $25 discount or free shipping on something, you can
just use that email address and then not get bombarded
with the spam mail. That's a really good idea to
(25:38):
start with separating business and personal. So you might have
multiple inboxes and people think, oh, that's so hard to handle.
That's just too much logging in and logging out. It's not.
You can use Gmail or Outlook to actually set them up.
So you just go into outlook and you've got your
3 or 4 different email addresses there. One of them
(25:59):
you might be checking once a month because it's mainly spam.
One of them you might be checking once a day
because it's mainly important correspondence. Another one you might be
checking just 2 or 3 times a month because it's
mainly farm bills. And again, it's just about being able
to then maintain privacy. If in the future you decide
to outsource some of this. So if you've got one
(26:21):
email address, which is everything, it's really hard then to
give someone the autonomy to say, as each email comes through,
process that in the way that I want it processed.
So you're not there forwarding things all the time.
S2 (26:34):
Otherwise you're really not saving any time, are you? No, you're.
S3 (26:36):
Not, you're not. You might as well be doing it yourself.
And I think that's the point that people come to.
If I've got to forward that email address to them
and then I've got to approve that payment, I may
as well have done the whole thing myself. So it's
about just setting things up so they're easy for other
people as well. Think about that in terms of business
continuity as well. So a lot of us are running
businesses that might be quite large in terms of turnover,
(26:58):
but small in terms of admin capacity, and we don't
have replication in our farm offices. So if we're taken
out or another family member is taken out, that might
mean system shut down. So think about if we quarantine
all of our business email to one email address, we
can quickly redirect something, ring our accountant, engage a bookkeeper
(27:19):
and say look for the next six weeks. Can you
just take over this part of the role and make
sure all my staff get paid and my bills get paid?
It's harder to do that if we've got every single
thing about sport and school and footy and the grain
marketing and the bills and the newsletters and mates emailing
us if that's all in the same inbox, it becomes
(27:41):
a much harder job.
S2 (27:42):
That makes sense. What else, Carmen, can we be doing right now?
S3 (27:46):
Well, the other thing is online safety. And I think
when I've said some of these things, there've been people listening, going, oh,
that sounds frightening. What if I get hacked? You know,
it's all too hard. Your money's all on the cloud anyway.
So realistically, if you're concerned about putting a document in
a Google Drive or a Dropbox, just get over it
because all your money is on the cloud. Just get.
S2 (28:07):
Over it.
S3 (28:07):
It's not in a bank anywhere. No one's guarding it.
There's no one standing outside with a, you You know,
rifle or something. It's all on the cloud. So what
can you do on your end to increase your internet safety?
Multifactor ID on anything where you can switch it on
is so important. So that's when they shoot you a
little text message, and you've got to write that code
(28:28):
back into the program. It's annoying.
S2 (28:31):
My phone auto fills it. Yeah.
S3 (28:33):
It doesn't work so well on the laptop or on
the computer, but I love it when it auto fills.
What I didn't love was a few years back when
we didn't have a booster on the phone, and I'd
have to run outside and climb up to the top
of the cubby house, and then I'd hold my hand
up to get the text message. And then it was
like a race against time to get back into the
office again to type the code in. So look, if
(28:53):
that's still you, just spend the money, upgrade your mobile coverage.
If that's the thing that's stopping you turning on multifactor ID,
or you don't have your Wi-Fi set up properly, make
sure you spend the money to do that.
S2 (29:06):
That's a good point. Time saver not getting into the
cubby house.
S3 (29:08):
Yeah yeah yeah yeah, definitely. So the installing software updates
is really important as well. So when your phone says
it needs to do an update, when your laptop or
your computer says it needs to do an update, click
to do the update. Because what they're not telling you
is that they've found the hackers have found a way
to get in, and they've got a patch that will
protect you. So make sure you keep those up to date. So, Janine,
(29:31):
tell me, are your passwords, your dog's name and a
combination of someone's date of birth?
S2 (29:37):
They're not, I've recently done, a bit of a cyber security
kind of thing. And that's why I've done all the
password authentication - well when all the hacking happened, you know, Medibank.
Yes. And yeah. So I don't anymore. But I can
imagine that a lot of people would probably because there's
so many to remember, there are.
S3 (29:54):
So many to remember. And what we try and do
is by just changing a digit on the end or
just putting capitals on that one, you know, if we
have 5 or 6 goes at it, it will eventually
crack it. And you feel like a bit of a
hacker just by getting in yourself. The reality is that
if we're duplicating passwords, what happens is someone in the
tree gets hacked first and they're generally low stakes. So
(30:17):
it might be just your local shoe shop is set
up online purchasing, and they want you to get an account.
And you sign up for that because you get $10
off or something. They get hacked. And because you've used
your dog's name and your date of birth. They go, ooh,
what's the chance that Janine has also used this password
and this email address for something more important, and they
will eventually get in that way. So duplication is a
(30:38):
really bad idea. We need to use secure and complex passwords.
It's really hard to do that unless you're using a
password keeper program. So there's some great ones out. Yeah
they're amazing. So like 16 digit really complex passwords with
all of the things. And the beauty of it is
when we use that, they're not saying you've used this
(30:58):
password before. They're not saying we need a digit, we
We need a character. You haven't used a capital. The
passwords go through straight away all the time. And again,
a lot of those have got the capability to pre-fill them.
So those password vault programs, KeyPass, keychain, dashlane's one of the
ones I use, there's 4 or 5 of them out there.
That is all they do. You want a program that's standalone.
(31:21):
So yes, Apple have got some capabilities to store passwords.
Google have. But if they go down, the whole ship
goes down. So what you want to do is just
make sure it's a standalone password keeping and password generating
program and be prepared to pay money for it, because
if you're not paying money for it, how are they
getting the money? They need to keep your information safe?
(31:41):
So definitely explore that. They are one of those things
that does make life easier and makes you more secure.
S2 (31:50):
So, Carmen, security, what else can we be doing to
protect ourselves?
S3 (31:54):
Look, I think that in our family, businesses that tend
to be most vulnerable are the older generation and the
youngest generation. So for the older ones, it's about really
keeping in contact. So having those phone calls, just making
sure that if they're worried about a text message that's
come through about a toll, that they don't click on it,
(32:15):
that they give you a call, that you show them
how to block things, that you delete what needs to
be deleted, that they're just really cyber aware, and also
that they're not lonely because one of these things, and
it's not necessarily a farm business thing, it's about the
online romance, friendship, investment, sort of scams. The people that
tend to be the most vulnerable are those that are
(32:35):
the most lonely. So keeping in contact and being a
good family member to our oldies is just important for
so many reasons. But that's one of them. That's such
a good point.
S2 (32:47):
I think there was an article The Barefoot wrote about
that too, and about maybe just go over to your
neighbor and have a cup of coffee.
S3 (32:53):
Yeah, yeah. And if that stops them wanting to meet
up with Sam from Nigeria, that's a great thing because
they know that they've got someone to have a cup
of tea too that's prepared to listen to their problems. Look,
younger generations, it's more about that sort of sextortion type
sharing nudes piece. And again, it's about education again. It's
about conversations again. It's about making people feel happy in themselves,
(33:16):
secure and all of those things so that not, you know,
if something feels a little bit off, they've got the
confidence to just say, no, hold on, wait. That doesn't
feel quite right. So most definitely have those conversations with
your family members.
S2 (33:33):
Is there anything else that you would recommend our listeners
do right now if they're not already doing, whether it's
technology or cyber? Any other advice?
S3 (33:43):
I think it's being open minded and excited about the future.
It's easy to just slip into that zone of thinking, oh,
it's all too hard and everything's changing too quickly. All
of us can fall into that trap, but it's about
just taking on the changes one by one, working out
what needs to be done, and being prepared to make
that investment in learning something for the pay off later on.
(34:06):
We don't learn anything without deliberately making those choices to
learn it. So just step up to the plate and
take it on because you might surprise yourself. It might
be something that you really get into when you're really
good at it.
S2 (34:18):
That is such excellent advice, Carmen. Talking about keeping an
open mind with these new technologies I'm just thinking about
for people that are perhaps doing succession or someone starting
to take the books on from another person in the business,
would you have any advice on how to get that
transition to to go smoothly?
S3 (34:39):
Oh look, the technology transition and the intergenerational issues is
often clashes there. You know, there's often a person within
the business and they're probably the person listening to this
podcast that just wants to move things along really quickly.
So to all the tech people out there that are
keen to make the changes, there's just a few things
to be aware of. One is that if you are
(35:00):
trying to implement change, just make sure that it's got
a fair chance of success. So if you're trying to
get semi-literate truck driver to suddenly be using six different
apps for six different things, it's probably not going to work.
And you've got to look at implementing perhaps some easier
ways to make that work, which might be just screenshots
or still handing in a paper form, even though everybody
(35:21):
else is doing things the digital way. That's perfectly okay
if you're taking something on and you are making some changes,
the person that's taking it on, you've got to trust
them that they're doing the right thing. I think that
becomes a communication thing as well. So if you've got
an older generation saying, oh, look, before we used to
pay every bill, this person used to look over it.
(35:42):
And then I used to ring this and I'd send
a cheque off because that was the safe way of
doing it. Look, things have changed. And it's about really
communicating that we still are doing fundamentally the same thing.
We still have all of the checks and balances in place.
They just don't necessarily look the same as they used to.
But the fundamental things of what we've got going on,
(36:03):
people are getting paid. We're doing it in a secure
fashion we know we're up to financially. All of that
still happening.
S2 (36:09):
That's such a good point. Thank you. Carmen, was there
anything else that you would like our listeners to know?
S3 (36:15):
All just to get out there and explore something, just
to talk to their friends about it and ask them
what they're doing that 's different. It's great. Amongst any community.
We've got some great early adopters out there that are
looking at new things, and between the early adopters, some
of them have caught on to something else before someone
else has done so. My big thing is that if
you've got a problem, someone else has already worked out
(36:36):
the answer to it. It's just about finding what the
answer is.
S2 (36:39):
That's such a good outlook, Carmen. So I do have
one more question. What is the best advice that you've
been given, whether it's on the farm or in life?
S3 (36:48):
Oh, look, I think the big thing is that nothing
lasts forever, you know, and it's just whatever season you're
going through in your life, whatever seasonal conditions you're going
through on farm, whatever it is, it never, ever lasts forever.
So it's just very much about being in the moment
and working out what needs to be done now and
concentrating on that, because before you know it, something else
(37:10):
becomes the highest priority.
S1 (37:14):
BCG drives the prosperity of Australian farmers, communities and landscapes
through applied research, innovation and events. To find out more
about what we're up to, our team and events near you,
visit bcg.org.au
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I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com